


i've been trying not to break (and now it's falling into place)

by hellynz



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Insomnia, Love/Hate, Other, bed sharing, me being self indulgent and only writing about my fave tropes, prompt: haunted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:26:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24509884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellynz/pseuds/hellynz
Summary: 'Every throb of her head was a reminder, every catch of breath in her throat. Any moment she had not yet found him was another moment he could tear at the fabric of the universe. 'The Doctor stops being able to sleep with the Master loose on the universe. So she locks him in the vault. That doesn't help, either.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 91





	i've been trying not to break (and now it's falling into place)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [riptheh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riptheh/gifts).



> i just physically cannot stop writing about 13 torturing herself emotionally over the Master
> 
> For the Thirteen Fanzine prompt, 'Haunted'. Check us out! https://thirteenfanzine.tumblr.com/
> 
> Also it's for hetzi bc wbk they love a good painful thoschei fic

The Doctor does not make the conscious decision to stop sleeping. It creeps up on her, anxious and involuntary, until sleep seems like something mythical.

The Master is in the universe, somewhere. She knows it. She can’t find him but she can practically taste him, prickling on her tongue, can feel that he is not gone and has not died and that he escaped and he is out there, lurking, planning something.

How is she supposed to sleep when he could be just around the corner? Every time she considers closing her eyes, she sees another planet, burned.

She tries, really. She hasn’t been much good at it for awhile. A few bodies ago slept like death until Martha left, and then the loneliness was too much for him. Ever since, it has been elusive. Often found only several days too late, catching up with them when they dared to lie down or to sit somewhere too dark and quiet.

This body, however, evaded it as much as it evaded her, even before the Master.

Weeks pass in between, sometimes. Sleep is not a thing she needs extremely often anyways. Time Lords go without it often, existing in a state of relative coherency. But it really is something they still should do, regularly. Eat, drink, rest, sleep. Sit down. Pause.

She doesn’t.

At first it was just because she was excited. She was happy, happier than she has been for regenerations. Bright and perky and ready, and just not interested in laying her head down. She showed her fam everywhere beautiful that she could think of, making a never ending list. Destination after destination, endless preparations. But they do have to sleep, and quite regularly. Frequently, almost. So sometimes, late at night, when the tiredness pricked at her and the humans had long since retired, she would throw switches and twist knobs, and lands somewhere new.

Alone is less fun, but it is better than not at all. It’s better than resting, wasting any of her precious time just sleeping the days away. In with her newfound happiness had rushed a desperate energy, one that needs to tackle everything at once. She had spent decades sitting in her old body, centuries in the one before, always waiting and watching over something. She refuses to sit anymore.

She only sleeps when she drops. Hands held above her deep in the console, a blink that was a touch too slow, and suddenly she was jerking herself awake with the clang of her tools falling to the floor around her. Sat in a hotel room, waiting for the humans around her to wake and not able to do anything fun for fear of waking them, she would suddenly blink herself back to consciousness, her head on the desk.

Occasionally, it sneaks up on her when she is somewhere she feels very safe. She made the mistake of leaning back in Graham’s sofa one day while waiting for him to grab something upstairs, Yaz and Ryan on their way over after work, and she jerked awake hours later to the sound of the whole fam making dinner in the kitchen. It was warm, and soft, and she felt better, even if she was a bit sheepish, slinking into the kitchen and pretending her hair wasn’t all mussed, her clothes wrinkled.

When she reunited with O, she fell asleep on his couch, too.

She did not feel the call of his TARDIS. But, somehow, she felt at home. She’d thought it was just the presence of someone who had lasted three bodies. The comfort of being near someone who had not yet left her, even if their relationship was exclusively texting each other.

She just- she had really thought that O was her friend, and that he liked her, and that being near him made her feel safe and comfortable. She hadn’t realized all of it was just familiarity.

Sleep wasn’t the plan. But she was already overdue, too busy exploring to rest, and when she sat on his couch and listened to the silence of the outback, her eyelids grew heavy. Her friends were all already whisked away to guest rooms, and O had disappeared somewhere too, and there wasn’t much more she could actually do. 

She woke hours later, the imprint of the arm of the sofa pressed into her cheek. And she felt rested. Good, and calm, and like she could walk for days without stumbling.

The next day sent the world crashing around her. O was not her friend. And her nap on his couch had not been needed, or restful. It had been dangerous. She had sat there, her friends unconscious with only her as protection, and she had failed them to nap, too. 

The moment she knew the Master was out in the world, she went from forgetting to sleep until she dropped to actively avoiding it.

How could she? How could she stop and lie down when he was there, when she could spend the hours looking for him instead? Every throb of her head was a reminder, every catch of breath in her throat. Any moment she had not yet found him was another moment he could tear at the fabric of the universe. 

Her eyes ached and she knew her friends could tell. They think it is the origin of her mood. And it does not help, of course. She grows moodier and moodier, tired and jittery. 

But she can’t help it. If she pauses for a single moment, if she isn’t looking, _that_ is exactly when he will show up and she knows it, she cannot stand it. If she dares to look away, he will appear, and he will wreak havoc, and he will be gone again before she notices him. So she does not look away.

The console burned itself into her retinas. She found a routine, a few dozen reports she could be running at all times scattered across its surface, so that if she shuffles sideways, hunched over, fiddling and readjusting each one, a whole rotation can kill hours. Sometimes it would kill an entire day, if she got really into the fiddling. Once, she found herself leaning up, eyelids heavy and back aching, and it had been so long it took her a moment to pluck the time from the air around her. Six earth hours had passed. She wasn’t sure if the fam had ever approached her, too focused on her work, and she winced away from her screens, stepped back to find them. She was halfway to the kitchen when she remembered they weren’t even on board.

Eventually, the grumpiness fades to a manic exhaustion. And she can live with that. She might be a bit more bitey than she used to be, she might snap more and hold back less, but it’s better than it was before. She still doesn’t stop looking, keeps her searches always running and set to report to her sonic on the rare occasions when she isn’t fiddling, even if her hands shake on the controls.

And then she looked away, for just a moment. The lone Cyberman appears, and Bill flashed before her eyes as she moved to put herself squarely between it and her fam. And then the Cyberium, and then they were chasing it, and then the whole war, crashing before her dry eyes, all of humanity wiped out except a few, and she stood on a summit and it was freezing cold, she was so tired, if she took one wrong step she would collapse, and then-

In the midst of all of the action, she missed a beeping on her sonic. She looked away for just one moment. And then there he was again, fallen before her aching eyes. As she stood over him, trembling with rage, she almost wishes she had thought to just look away sooner. Might as well have gotten it over with.

She choked back the furious triumph that held itself in a lump in her throat, and she walked with him.

—————

From there, everything on Gallifrey moves so quickly she can barely focus on it. Events whirl past her tired eyes, refuse to settle like memories in her brains.

Trapped in the Matrix, she knows he will knock her out. And she almost thinks it will be a relief. He smothers her consciousness and she aches for it for a moment, so ready to sleep, to rest. But she gets nothing of the sort. Instead, she gets more nightmare fuel, more reasons to stay awake, and the mechanism pulls at her, burning away the last of her reserves of energy.

The timeless child. Memories she cannot remember but can feel, pulling at the edges of her mind, terror and torture and her entire childhood lost to the greed of a maniac. The Master shows her and he isn’t even happy about it. His eyes are rimmed with red.

Ruth shows up, and she wants to laugh. More unwanted visitors, more people out in the world who she could not control. More actions being done and choices being made that she had no say in, and so more things that she could not fix if they went wrong. Instead of laughing, she just complains.

“I’m so tired,” she murmurs, pressing her hands to her eyes. She feels like she could keel over any second. But-

“No time to be tired,” Ruth replies, and the Doctor knew it all along. 

So she forces herself forward. She clutches at the edges of what she does and doesn’t know, and she insists it upon herself. She is okay. If only for a moment, she can swallow it, she can stand over him and stare down and say that she is not broken. Because she isn’t; she’s only cracked, even if the crack is really from a stress fracture that keeps opening a bit more and a bit more, just a little here and there. Popping like broken bones under her skin.

She only stands there, hand on the trigger, staring down into his eyes, for a few seconds. Time clicking by, and she counts it in her head, measuring it in relation to the Earth’s distance from the sun. He has tears in his eyes, but he’d spent about half of their conversation that day with tears in his eyes. He was as bad as Missy.

She lets Ko Sharmus take the detonator. And in the moment of shock, as the Masters’s teary eyes morph into a terrible rage, she presses her hand to his neck. Feels a double heartbeat against her fingers. Knocks him out, and she shouts something about the host being so weak he passes out from the lightest touch and the Cyberium spills from him, and she grabs him under the arms, and she drags him from the room.

She does not let herself think for too long about what she has left behind.

The Master doesn’t move until she had him back in the vault. Door sealed shut, room bright, piano still there. And the Master, slumped on the floor. 

She tries very, very hard not to think of Missy. The way they had circled each other with her in there, the Doctor’s old body the one in control on the outside and Missy, somehow, leading from within. When he had needed another brain like his and he had come in here to ask her, to throw ideas back and forth, and he had felt- 

It had felt real, to have Missy in here as his ally. It had felt reasonable to let her out. She had tricked him, thoroughly and without much effort. And now the Doctor did not even know if the man slumped on the floor back in there came before or after Missy.

It takes longer than she would like for his head to lift. Long enough that she becomes worried and half convinces herself that she’d done it wrong, that she’d hurt him somehow. Long enough to make her chastise herself for caring, long enough for her to reign that old phantom affection back into place and smother it underneath her hearts. Almost long enough to go back inside the sealed cage and check on him. But then he shifts. A groan rumbles from him and his head starts to lift up. She straightens.

He rolls over onto his back and sighs,, staring at the ceiling. She can see the grin starting to twist itself across his face even from across the room. “Well, I recognize that ceiling, don’t I?”

Confirmation cracks over her skull like a raw egg. So he has already been Missy. The anger in her hearts threatens to burst into grief, and she clenches it like she clenches her jaw, forcing the edges back together. She does not say a word. He turns to her eventually, his head lolling a bit to stare, eyes sparkling with glee as he smiles. “You just couldn’t stand to be apart, could you?”

Still, she does not give him a response. She continues to not speak as she turns, not breaking eye contact, staring at him as she enters the code and exits the vault, locking it behind her with a clank.

—————

She hopes that having him back on board, locked up in the vault that held him for decades, she will finally feel some kind of relief, maybe even be able to sleep. But instead it only worsens.

Before, he was only maybe out in the universe, only maybe causing harm. There was every chance that he was, in fact, still trapped in the Kasavin dimension, and maybe he would be forever. No proof that he was capable of harm until he did it. Schroedinger’s psychopath. She hadn’t realized how desperately she had been clinging to that possibility until it was gone, and he was lying beneath her floorboards. She can feel his presence like a gas leak, hotter the closer she ends up to the vault, making her head ache and her eyes hurt and her mind go all fuzzy.

Days pass. She still does not sleep. The fam hovers around her, worried and confused, and a bit mad at her all over again. It hurts her, that they seem used to this routine - fun, then moody, then sad, then fun again. She does not want them to have to hover, to wait her out. But she makes them anyway.

She does not tell them the truth of what had happened with the Master. She just shows back up in their lives, popping into existence on Earth, told them that Ko Sharmus had run after her and had taken over and that she had given in.

She should have forced him back, probably. Should have insisted upon dying, and watching as the Master died, just to finally get that resolution. Maybe ultimate, final death would be restful. Or maybe, she thinks, anxiety clawing itself back up her throat, she wouldn’t have died. Maybe she would have regenerated, over and over and over, endlessly because there was no limit to her, she was the _source_ , and maybe she would still be doing it now. But that’s not a thought she can quite handle, drowning in exhaustion and in guilt.

Wallowing was a specialty of quite a few of her bodies, and it seems this one is predisposed to it as well. She wallows in the dreadful, throbbing pit that is her guilt. Because not only did she not die for her sins. Not only did she not die for every terrible thing she had ever done, but she told her friends she would, and she let someone else do it instead. She knows it. They know it. It haunts her, in every darkened corner of her ship. It bursts into her vision that she is still alive, it bites at her that she let him die. And in the end, she didn’t even let the worst die with him. Instead of two mass murders dying, one hero did. It makes her shudder.

On the third day, she re-enters the vault. The Master is facing away from her. He sits at the piano, plucking idly away at a tune she does not recognize. She leaves again. She pretends she didn’t see him start to turn his head at the swishing release of the door. 

It is not time. She is not ready. He was not even looking for her. Clearly, none of this mattered to him. So why should it matter to her. She forces her steps forward, she forces fine-ness into her smile and into her movements. 

But it hasn’t convinced any of the fam. They still hover, and she still wallows, and it drowns her. It haunts her like the Master haunts her halls.

She does not want to be seen. If any of them notice her suffering, she pushes it off. She shoves away from the shore, she dredges through reality by herself. But, at the same time, she is desperate for their gaze. If they were to look at her, maybe she could admit it. If they were to ask, she would never speak a word.

Is a ship the same ship if you replace every board on it? Suffering, silent, hands shoved into the depths of the TARDIS, lights blue and orange around her, she wonders if she is the same person who left Susan without her other shoe.

She finds Graham in the kitchen, one night. It is when she knows for sure that he has noticed. He does not say it, but she can see it in his eyes.

“Got some new tea,” he says, smiling at her, worried and soft and grandfatherly. He should be asleep, and she’s pretty sure Yaz and Ryan are already. But she’s stumbled into the kitchen, fatigue dragging at her feet, and so it’s her own fault. Leaving the console, exposing herself to the places where the other linger and live as she wallows and suffers and lies, listless.

“Yeah?” she asks, barely able to gather the energy to answer him.

“Yeah. Want some?” It isn’t really a question; he’s already filling two mugs. She can smell it in the air, chamomile and spearmint and lemon grass. It almost makes her yawn, but she swallows it back.

To step forward and accept a cup is to give in. When he smiles over to her, she cannot deny him again. She’s already failed to die for him. She can at least drink his tea.

He smiles when she takes the cup, and it clenches around her hearts. It’s a rudimentary human concoction; an herbal remedy for sleeplessness. She wonders if it could actually help her. Graham raises an eyebrow and clears his throat when she reaches for the sugar. She stops, trying not to look sheepish - can’t feel guilty if she doesn’t even admit that there’s something to feel guilty for- and raises the cup to her lips, black.

“Heard from some of the boys back home that they’re getting a new boss,” Graham murmurs after a moment, sitting across the table from her.

“Hmm?” she hums back, lifting the cup again.

“Aren’t too happy about it. We had the same guy on top for a few decades, and the boys aren’t thrilled about change. If you ask me, I think it might be overdue, Tom was going a bit fuzzy in his old age-”

She can feel that it’s working. Sitting, and drinking warm tea, and listening to Graham chatter softly about the news back in Sheffield. Exhaustion drags at her, pulling down her eyelids and pinching at the back of her skull. She rouses herself twice, catches herself on the verge of toppling over with her chin barely propped up in her hand. Graham doesn’t react, but she can feel the worry radiating off of him. It’s almost a relief, to be perched so precariously on the edge of sleeping. In a fuzzy world where she would be roused by the smallest sound, but she might be recharging a bit. 

The third time her head dips, she is unable to resist the call any longer. Her face hits the table before she can really process that she’s slipping into unconsciousness.

She wakes some time later, clutching desperately at the hour, face pressed stinging against the cold linoleum of the table. Graham is gone, but there is a blanket around her shoulders. Her hearts are racing, some instantly forgotten nightmare retreating to the back of her mind. Her throat feels raw.

It has been minutes, maybe. She is not entirely sure. It could have been hours.

She trips over herself in her rush to check the vault. This time, she can’t keep herself from taking a few steps inside. And he really looks up at her.

“Been avoiding me, love?” he asks, spreading a plastic-thin grin across his face. “I’ve heard you come in but I never get to see that gorgeous face.”

“Why?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer. She gives him much longer than she would have in another face. Her last self, with his wrinkled skin and bushy eyebrows, had stared at Missy in her vault and had forgiven her a million times over without actually giving anything at all. This body cannot forgive. This body will not forget.

“Why what?” he said finally. He is sitting on the piano bench but facing away from the instrument, knees spread, elbows perched on his thighs. As she watches he straightens up, bringing his knees together and pointing them towards the other corner of the room, folding his hands in his lap. She can see him, suddenly, wearing a purple dress and teary eyes.

“Why did you leave me?” she asks finally.

His bemused raised eyebrow falls, and his mouth drops open. “When did I leave you? You’re the one who wouldn’t press the button. You know, Doctor, I think your brain might be a bit-”

“Not _you_ you,” she hisses through gritted teeth, pressing the heels of her hands to her eyes again. “Missy. Why did you- I really thought you had changed.”

Colors burst behind her eyelids but she doesn’t stop pressing. She watches the shapes in them as they drift, flashing between different forms. She can’t keep any of them in her vision long enough to properly identify them.

He laughs. It starts as a low chuckle, and then he throws his head back and lets it peal around the room like a howl. She does lower her hands then and she stares at him, fury and horror licking like flames at the pit of her stomach. 

“What is so funny?” she asks finally, barely able to force the words out.

He just shakes his head, his eyes all crinkled up in a way that she had thought was so cute on O-

She stalks from the room again. He scoffs behind her, and when she turns to slam the door shut, even though she does not look up to meet his eyes, she can feel his gaze on her, furious and confused.

He haunts her every waking moment- so, of course, that means every moment. She cannot turn a corner of her hallways without being convinced he is just around it, hiding in the dark, waiting to pounce at her, waiting to pound at one of her fam. He flickers in the edges of her vision. But every time she thinks to head for the vault, she becomes convinced he is out of the cage and lurking behind the locked door, waiting for her to come so that he can finally escape-

She tries to head for the kitchen. She has to sprint past the doorway and down the next hall because she is sure she just saw purple coattails flap around the corner, but no one is there. She follows the phantom anyway, almost sprinting through the halls. She’s so convinced he is just ahead of her, even as she is positive that he cannot be, and her head starts to pound as she runs. Her motive shifts abruptly; she isn’t trying to catch up anymore. She is trying to outrun something - him, her own thoughts, her weariness - until she rounds the corner and-

There is Yaz, her own stride stuttering as the Doctor comes towards her in a whirlwind, stumbling to a halt.

“Are you alright?” she asks, her gaze immediately flickering past the Doctor, to see what horrible thing could be pursuing her.

The Doctor tries to brush it off, to spit out some excuse, but finds herself leaning forward, perching both hands on her knees and her shoulders heaving as she gasps for breath. How long had she been running for? 

“Yeah, I’m- sorry. It’s nothing,” she manages finally, cringing when Yaz’s hovering hand comes to rest on her lower back.

“Are you sure? Why were you running?” Yaz asks, and her voice is so pinched with worry it makes the Doctor shudder.

“No reason. Just- sometimes you need to run, you know?” she tries, spreading her lips into a fake smile. 

Yaz stares at her, and then nods slowly. “Yeah, but usually people do that on a track or something, don’t they? Or- at least they put on the right clothes for it,” she finishes, her eyes drifting up and down the Doctor’s body, and the Doctor winces, feels sweat on her forehead and under her arms.

“Ah. Well, you know, good point! I should go-”

“Wait, Doctor-” Yaz stops her, reaching out to take her wrist again, and the Doctor flashes back to her last honorable moment, the last time she had deserved any of her friends worry or care. Yaz trying to stop her from sacrificing herself, Ryan’s jaw settled in miserable acceptance, Graham staring at her, eyes wide and worried. They had thought she would give herself for them. She had meant to give herself for them. But she hadn’t done it. Instead, she had dragged her ghost onto the ship with them and _what if he was right around the corner-_

“Are you okay?” Yaz asks, and raises one hand when the Doctor opens her mouth to deny her immediately. “I mean in general, not right now, not because of the running. Are you okay, like, overall? You’ve seemed off ever since you came back.”

The Doctor rears back, nodding. “Yeah! Don’t- don’t worry, I’m just- old, is all. Have some funny ways of processing things, is all.”

Yaz frowned at her, worried. “Like running around in the dark?”

“It’s not-” the Doctor started, gesturing behind her. But it is dim, the light gone all dark blue. “Oh. Well, you know.” She shrugged and shoved her hands in her pockets, grinning, plastic-faced. “Care to join me for a cuppa?”

Yaz goes with her, even if it’s a bit reluctant at first. And the Doctor tells her a story about somewhere she went with Donna, once, even though she only calls Donna her friend. By the end of it, Yaz is laughing, and Ryan has entered to lean against the counter and laugh with her, and it would almost be normal if the Doctor’s eyes weren’t begging her to shut them, if she didn’t have to smother an enormous yawn between each sentence.

She does not give in to it. Even when her friends both say they’re off to bed, and give her very pointed looks. “Repairs,” she says, nose wrinkling as she turns, starts the trudge back to the console room. Pretends she did not think she saw the flash of a purple jacket pulling around the opposite corner. 

Ryan hesitates. And so does Yaz, both of them staring after her. But eventually, Yaz nods. “Okay,” she says, and she reaches and takes Ryan’s sleeve and pulls him along.

It’s better now, because she has thrown them off. She made them laugh. And someone so horrifically torn up, someone drowning in a whirlwind of feelings that she refuses to try to identify- that person couldn’t make anyone laugh. Clearly, then, she is not that person. She talks herself along as she goes down the hall, makes herself sure that no, it was not just being trusting, it was not just the two of them thinking she knew how to take care of herself. She was better and she had convinced them of it, that was all.

When she makes it back to the console room she almost collapses in the doorway, but she manages to drag her feet long enough to pull herself into a hatch underneath. In the darkness, she closes her eyes and tosses an arm over her face. Sleep pulls at her, dragging her down, making her arm too heavy to lift back up. 

Against the back of her eyelids, she can practically see his smile. Locked up in her vault, sealed inside, and still haunting her. He could not escape, she knew it. She had taken extra precautions, after Missy. And so even though she had gotten out before, this version of him never would. 

But he still played in the corners of her vision. Half asleep, dragged under the console, she feels like she can hear his footsteps, marching closer to her, his hands twisting together and his smile evil and huge, the fam exposed and alone as she dozes, as helpless as they had been while she slept on O’s couch-

She jerks up, hitting her head on the metal above her. There are no plaid legs standing in front of her. No one smiles down. She still drags herself out and up, and, mustering whatever she has left inside her, heads towards the vault.

—————

“I need you to tell me,” she spits out, the door only halfway open as she shoves herself inside. 

“You really _thought_ I had changed,” he barks, tone mocking, in the same breath.

They stare at each other.

“What?” she asks finally, trying to hold back the anger, trying not to start screaming, or crying.

He stares at her, his eyes huge and his jaw trembling until he clenches it. She watches the muscles in his jaw spasm. He’d been pacing, if the position he’s frozen in is any indication. Arms crossed, fingers white knuckled against his own skin, standing with one leg in front of the other. He’d been waiting for her.

“You thought I had changed,” he says again, finally, and he grins for just a moment, laughing through his nose, until his face crumbles into a glare again. “And yet you still left me behind?”

“What are you talking about?” she says, and it’s almost a sob. “Of course you hadn’t actually changed. You said you hadn’t. You left with him.”

“I was lying,” he barks, and she almost topples over. “I was going to betray him and come back to you.” The ceiling threatens to collapse around her. His teary eyes and Missy’s float in front of her vision. She feels hazy.

“No- no you weren’t,” she says finally.

He laughs again, but if there was ever any genuine humor in his laughter, it is gone now. “How would you possibly know? _You_ left _me_ before you could find out.” His eyes are flashing at her with madness, dark and dreary and tired and so, so angry. Angry at the universe, angry at the cage, angry at her. It all crashes over her, manic and swirling and pulling at her, weighing her down. In her utter exhaustion, it threatens to drown her.

“Years and years of it, Doctor, _decades_ of trying to ‘fix’ me, and all it took was a single lie to completely drop me again.”

She is entering the vault, she realizes very suddenly. Her hands are trembling as she unlocks the door and flings it open. “No, Master,” she barks at him, stalking forward as he moves to meet her. “What you did was tell me that you were leaving me, that you would not travel with me and you would not stand with me. You said it was all you had ever wanted and you left me, you betrayed me-”

“Actually, my dear,” he interrupts, and she is right in his face without really noticing most of the walk over, blackness pricking at the corners of her vision. “What I did was lie to convince him, and trust that you would trust me. I thought that after everything, after all of those years, I thought you would have faith in me long enough to hang back for five bloody minutes. But instead you left me to regenerate alone, you turned away the minute there was the slightest possibility that I wasn’t exactly what you wanted. You know what? Maybe I did leave you. But if I did, you already had.”

They blink at each other. She cannot find it in herself to say another word. She pictures Missy, lying, dying on the ground, cold and trying to go back to the Doctor, and hearing the TARDIS dematerialize.

“I left you to prove myself and come back, but you abandoned me to die before I could. I left to come back,” he says, and he’s practically whispering now, and she feels her respiratory bypass threaten to kick in as she gasps for a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “I left to kill him and to come back to you. I left to make him become her sooner, to come back to you sooner. But you didn’t believe me.”

The Doctor stands in a field and they want to cry, they want to beg. But Missy turns away from them, tells them no. Tells them no. Tells them no, and leaves. With the version of them that kept them trapped in a cage for a year that did not happen. But Missy had been in a cage for decades.

“I just wanted to prove myself to you,” he says, and the words would almost be as soft as his eyes if he wasn’t spitting them through gritted teeth. “But you didn’t give me the chance.”

And the Doctor thinks about Missy whirling, hair frizzy and skirts flying, whacking her formal self on the head with her umbrella. Releasing the old version of the Doctor from his restraints. 

_Without witness, without reward._

“You weren’t…” she starts, gasping and stepping even closer to him. Her head thuds. Her vision is cloudy. She wants to cry, but she is not sure she can. Her eyes are too achey, too dry. It's her fault. It's all her fault, it always has been and it always will be. Missy had been trusting her, Missy had been on her way back, and the Doctor had left.

Her train of thought stops its spiral into despair as dizziness washes over her, sending her teetering backwards. His hands are on her forearms lightning quick, even if she cannot quite feel them, and with guiding hands so gentle they could not possibly be his, he settles her back onto the bed.

“Gone a bit wobbly, my dear,” he mutters, and she wants to shove him back but she can’t quite muster the strength to, and besides-

Had that been genuine concern?

“I-” she starts, swallowing, the whole world spinning around her. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

There is a very long pause, and then he scoffs. “Join the club.”

She sighs and tries to force herself upwards. “Don’t- get off-”

“Just helping you sit down,” he growls, and she realizes with a start that he is so close she can feel his words vibrating through his throat. “Not my fault that you keeled over.”

“Didn’t keel over,” she mutters, but she cannot rise. “Just- leave me alone.”

He grumbles at her, and it rumbles through his chest, and something in her wants so desperately to collapse against him. One hand releases one of her wrists, but instead of letting her go with both, he brings it around to cup gently against the back of her head, his fingers running gently into her hair.

“Master-,” she starts, eyes fluttering. “You can’t-”

His eyes are red rimmed too, she realizes suddenly. Heavy and half lidded, huge black bags underneath them. His hand moves again and settles against her cheek, brushing away a tear she hadn’t realized had fallen. She flinches back and glares at him, blinking furiously. 

“Maybe you should lie down,” he says finally, nodding towards the pillow at the head of the bed.

She wants to resist. But it might be more of an apology than she has ever gotten from him. And the pillow is calling to her like a siren, making her eyelids even heavier.

With a reluctant sigh, she lets herself fall. Her head collapses to the pillow and her mind goes fuzzy immediately, loafing through the air, meaningless. Thoughts no longer exist. He doesn’t exist, either, heavy behind her, until he does.

An arm drifts over to hover above her and then shifts back, moves to retreat. With the very last of her energy she reaches up and takes it by the wrist, pulling it around her. He had left to come back. Missy had been on her side, and then-

She begs his forgiveness in her mind as she finally succumbs. His warmth against her back, his arm around her waist, is the last thing she knows before sleep finally takes her. It is deep and dark, and she does not dream.

—————

She wakes almost fourteen Earth hours later. Her head, even on the pillow, is heavy with long-deep sleep, and for several minutes she doesn’t remember where she is, forgets that she even had a body to come back to. But, eventually, she cracks an eye open and shifts.

Missy had not betrayed her. The Master had wanted to stand with her. There is no heavy weight of an arm around her waist.

She throws herself upright and whips around, her head and eyes clear for the first time in months. He is not in the bed. And there is nowhere for him to be hiding. And the door to the vault is open.

She stumbles to her feet and flies out of the glass cage, making her way to the console as if in a dream; she feelsl her arms and legs moving, but nothing around her seemed to budge, the hallway stretching out past her into a terrible forever.

The console room is empty, and the door is open. When she leans out of it, catching herself on the door frame, she recognizes Fiyalz, a city made of technology new and old, home to millions of creatures misplaced in time. 

“No, come on, please,” she murmurs, taking a few steps out. The city sprawls in front of her, stretching for miles, black market dealers and real, almost legal time travel, spaceships for rent or for sale, endless ways in which he can have left her.

He was gone. She would never find him. She sends one desperate psychic call out over the city - _contact contact contact contact_ \- and she gets no response.

She has surveillance, she remembers with a gasp, and she whips back to face the center of her ship again. It’s already pulled up on her favorite monitor. 

He had not abandoned her immediately. He had collapsed behind her as readily as she had, and he had held her, and he had slept for almost the same amount of time. It was only a few minutes before she rose that he had lifted his own head from the pillow and then let it fall back, pulling his arm away from her to rub at his face.

He had sat up, feet flat on the ground, head hanging. And then he had stood and left the room. The Doctor does not keep video record of the rest of her ship.

“Why did you take him here?” she asks the ceiling finally, and she feels the TARDIS pet gently at the edges of her mind, soothing. An apology. “Why would you- what did he say?”

She does not get a response.

“Tell me,” she begs, curling her hands into fists and pressing them into the metal of the console. “Please, just- what did he say to you? Why did you listen?”

Somewhere deep below her, a fluttering of chimes goes off. But the TARDIS does not offer a response.

The Doctor sighs and sinks to the floor, but for once it is not fatigue that brings her there. Her mind is clear and her eyes do not hurt as she presses her forehead to her knees and tries not to cry. She won’t leave, this time. At least not right away. But it’s guilt that roots her to the spot, not hope. 

They’ve parted again, but it’s he who has left this time. Back out into the universe, to haunt her again. It’s her curse forever, probably, it always has been.

She should have let them both die.

**Author's Note:**

> angst


End file.
